After Blizzard turned off layering, no realm had queues. 14 days later, Whitemane had 5-hour queues, even though Whitemane was locked (no transfer to it) the whole time. Blizzard had to turn layering back on.
What happened in 2 weeks? Blizzard said they don’t know. I have no opinion. But maybe some players know. I will list the 3 ideas that I thought of (which could all be wrong). Please add to the list, or state your idea.
A huge number of new characters were started AND played for many hours.
The pop-drop to no queues was temporary. It lasted a week or two, then reverted to the higher norm.
Some group(s) on Whitemane want layers, and figured out a way to artificially increase the queues. They kept that up until it got bad.
When the server was locked it prevented new bots from being made and perhaps some were caught and banned after a period of time dropping que times and population. When they unlocked it the floodgates were opened and the bots rolled in again.
Here is Blizzard’s post from May 14: At this time, we’re contracting from two layers to one on all realms in this region that were layered…At the same time, we’ve unlocked any realms that were locked for new character creation. All Paid Character Transfer restrictions have been left in place.
This says Whitemane was unlocked for new character creation.
This says Whitemane was not unlocked for realm transfers.
So this comment is about creating new level 1s? Okay. That was my suggestion #1.
it’s probably players playing alts on a different realm. It really isn’t that unheard of to level a new character on a different realm.
I personally lock into one realm and play alts on that one realm with my main. I also personally think it’s better for the server that way also. Instead of rolling on a new server.
I don’t think the population dropped at all, I think they saw loads of people complaining about layering and just turned it off, along with the mix of some people going back to work, which was a stupid mistake to make this early.
I don’t know why blizzard doesn’t take a more active stance against bots. They could make up to 30x the money they would otherwise by banning them every day. If they force the botters to pay subscription fees every day that equals moolah.
Of course, the reality is that they want the botters so that they can receive a cut of the profits without looking crooked. Blizzard might not be doing backroom deals, but their Activision overlords aren’t averse to screwing players to make money.
I don’t understand why everybody has to play on Whitemane??? When Claic first released my buddies told me to roll on Whitemane because it was going to be THE server. It took me a week to realize it was cluster that was going to be nothing like original Vanilla servers sue to the massive population. Switched to a diff server that has ended up being medium pop and couldn’t be happier. Have checked out Whitemane every so often with my original toon and am so happy I left. This giant server you can not even run 5 mans because it is nothing but paying for boosting and fighting over resources.
I thought it was more like a month. I could be wrong, I didn’t look up the dates.
I had thought, for some reason, that they removed the new character creation restriction on all realms, but when I tried to make a new character on Whitemane, I was unable. Was this restriction removed then brought back?
it’s definitely the first option, but the way you state it makes it sound like you’re saying it’s real people behind these characters. That is false. A real human might have made the character initially but it is being played by an automated program. This is the norm on Whitemane and Herod. You go to level a character and in the early zones there are just hundreds of mages running around with mashed keyboard names.
There are thousands of bots like this between the Alliance and Horde. My usual hustle is going around Arathi to get Iron and Heavy Stone and I encountered so many hunter bots moving in strange, obviously pre-determined patterns. All of them were dwarves, had boars and were either unguilded or in known farmer guilds. It’s a huge problem, and it’s unreal that Blizzard refuses to do anything about it but is instead opting to layer the realms instead as a bandage instead of stitching the wound closed with a ban-wave and disabling char creation again.
If the numbers are as many as you suggest (thousands of bots), then maybe they could have at least 1 dedicated GM for policing botting. I’d be curious as to how much time, on average, it would take to verify such behavior, based on player reports.
I’m also curious as to what types of profiles are botting. With Classic there is no initial purchase, so the cost is only the $15/month subscription, making it less of a cost to be banned and create a new account. On the other hand, if large numbers of people on Whitemane are purchasing “services” through third parties who then bot on their accounts while “leveling” for them, etc. that could make it more and more difficult to isolate bots by account.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to conflate the two. Do you have any quotes of anyone defending bots, ever? (aside, of course, from the claim that “well, multiboxers are bots, so it’s the same,” as that isn’t agreed upon)
Yeah, I have to agree with the multiboxer sentiment.
We have a few multiboxers in our guild and they are real people with ambitions and lives who have developed real friendships and relationships within the guild.
They might use some funky software that synchronizes key strokes, but besides that, they are not abusing their good hardware and disposable income on breaking the TOS by doing things like selling gold for real currency. They are just people who wanted a leg up on gold generation so they didn’t have to worry about attaining monetary goals within the game.
There are bots who multibox, but not all multiboxes are bots.